4iP Blog

“You’ve taken the world of sticky promotional fliers, and shunted it into futuristic smartphone-land where you can do all the interesting social stuff.” Phabling beta tester.

Earlier this year 4iP put a little startup investment into Phabling, a mobile web app that makes it easier to find, share and record great nights out with your friends. Phabling is the first product of Glasgow-based digital start-up Sauce & Vinegar Limited, and 4iP invested along with Nesta’s Starter for 6 programme to develop a prototype, explore how it could be harnessed to help users discover other cultural treats on their doorstep and provide support to a new startup.

Since the investment, Heidi was invited to take part in mini Seedcamp and come away with more ideas on how to improve and develop the service.

Sauce & Vinegar was founded by Heidi Proven, moving from an eight year past working in broadcast television to bootstrapping her own startup. Founded to trial the Phabling concept, Sauce & Vinegar pitched to Nesta and 4iP to raise funds to develop a first stage beta.

Following many months of development, hard graft by a tiny team, and a steep learning curve Phabling is now in private beta. An app for desktop and mobile web, Phabling is about capturing snippets of events, which create your own personal guide to the best nights out. It also helps bring together those memories instead of seeing them lost in the black hole of status updates on your social networks. Venues can add events with a simple system dashboard, and users can interact with events and offers, either on their desktop or mobile web.

Phabling fills a gap for promotors, who want to have their events across social and mobile platforms, but don’t have the time to maintain all these spaces. Users and promoters also want higher levels of interaction, which Phabling’s beta phase has tested the potential for with its MySpace-based venue dashboard. This is where part of the revenue generation can take place to support the service into the future.

One of the beta’s core aims was to test the feel of a mobile app, using a mobile browser site. This approach enabled a broader test base to be accessed more quickly and with less expense. Ultimately, future versions of the app are well-placed to work across a myriad of devices, not just the device du jour. The Phabling beta illustrates the potential of the site, and tested the process of developing for mobile web.

Phabling will continue to be developed in private beta, tweaking the service following the key lessons learnt during the test stage with venues and users. Sauce & Vinegar are also scoping development of native phone applications to complement the mobile browser service, and pitching for funding to develop the product and be launched out of private beta.